The Use of Gasoline: Value, Oil, and the "American way of life"

Abstract:  While the critical literature has focused on the geography of oil production, the politics of "outrageous" gasoline prices in the United States provide a fertile path toward understanding the wider geography of petro-capitalism. Despite the deepening contradictions of US oil consumption, "pain at the pump" discourse projects a political sense of entitlement to low priced gasoline. I use a value-theoretical perspective to examine this politics as not only about the quantitative spectrum of price, but also the historical sedimentation of qualitative use-values inscribed in the commodity gasoline. Gasoline is analyzed both as a use-value among many within the postwar value of labor power and as a singular use-value fueling broader imaginaries of a national "American way of life." While use-value still represents an open site of cultural and political struggle infused within value itself, the case of gasoline illustrates how use-values are not automatically mobilized toward politically savory ends.     

Networks, narratives and territory in anthropological race classification: towards a more comprehensive historical geography of Europe's culture

This article aims to integrate discourse analysis of politically instrumental imagined identity geographies with the relational and territorial geography of the communities of praxis and interpretation that produce them. My case study is the international community of nationalist scientists who classified Europe's biological races in the 1820s-1940s. I draw on network analysis, relational geography, historical sociology and the historical turn to problematize empirically how spatial patterns of this community's shifting disciplinary and political coalitions, communication networks and power relations emerged, were structured, persisted, changed, interacted and disappeared. I focus especially on core-periphery relations. I argue that if local historical spatial patterns affect those of later phenomena, geographies like that of European integration should be understood in the context of Europe's complex historical cultural geography. Unlike discourse deconstruction alone, this complementary relational de-essentialization of geography can identify large-scale, enduring associations of cultural patterns as well as cultural flux and ambiguity.     

Time,place, and the lifeworlds of feminist geographers: the US in the 1970s

The 1970s, the decade in which Susan Hanson took up an academic appointment in American geography, was a period of marked growth in women's representation and political activism in the discipline and of the emergence of feminist research and teaching. Susan's career illustrates the changes in consciousness, resiliency in the face of setbacks, and creativity of the times. Inspired by the women's movement, and exemplifying collegiality, women geographers identified masculine biases in scholarship and professional practices, initiated research and teaching on women and gender, and worked to enter the leadership of the Association of American geographers. Their efforts were the genesis of the feminism in the profession that has since flourished in the United States. It is fitting that Susan Hanson's leadership and contributions in this arena are widely recognized and honored.     

Trade politics in the American Congress:: a study of the interaction of political geography and interest group behavior

Political geography plays an important role in influencing how industries build coalitions to secure desired trade benefits in American politics. The political geography of an industry is defined as the intersection of its economic geography, i.e. the location of its means of production, and the institutional structure of the political system in which it operates. In the case of the United States, trade-sensitive industries lobby the bicameral Congress and the executive branch for beneficial trade policies, and their geographic location strongly influences the strategies they adopt. Industries concentrated across heavily populated states will be more powerful in the House of Representatives than in the Senate. They will therefore ground their efforts in the House and form coalitions with industries that are powerful in the Senate. Industries that are concentrated across less populated states will be stronger in the Senate and will seek to form coalition partners that are strong in the House. A theory of political geography is used to explain the behavior of import/export sensitive industries in the 1980s and 1990s. The findings suggest that these industries choose coalition partners who bolster their political weakness in the House or Senate by extending, rather than replicating, their geographic base of support.     

The identification and significance of Apalachicola for the origins of the Creek Indians in the Southeastern United States

Apalachicola was a Hitchitee community that was considered the capital of the Creek Nation during the seventeenth and eighteenth century in the Southeastern United States. The role of this community in the formation of the southeastern political and cultural geography is paramount because of their coalescence with emigrant Muscogee people. In this article, I synthesize 10 years of research at the site and clarify the population history of this community. The research demonstrates the formation of the Creek culture area in the material record. Pottery surface decoration becomes measurably homogenous and I interpret this pattern as a result of that cultural development.     

Emma Willard and the graphic foundations of American history

Emma Hart Willard (1787–1870) authored one of the most widely printed textbooks of United States history, and created the first historical atlas of the United States. By drawing maps, graphs, and pictures of the country's past, Willard helped translate the fact of the country as a physical entity into the much more powerful fact of the country as a nation. Given the current academic preoccupation with the production, experience, and depiction of space, Willard's experimentation with the relationship of history and geography is highly worthy of close attention. Willard used the spatial dimension of the American past to engage students, develop their memories, integrate history and geography, and—most importantly—to consolidate national identity. In the process, learning itself became an act of nationalism.     

Approaching selfhood

Often overlooked is the fact that postmodern theory brought to the fore a crisis in the humanities. The implied universalism of the current “iconic turn” in postmodern thinking is a blow to the traditional sciences grouped around national literatures and cultures. In the 1980's, postmodern practitioners in the United States began to assault the discursive practices of the mainstream under the banner of cultural studies. The current crisis in the humanities surfaced in the emancipation of the various studies from their traditional fields in the humanities. The German Studies practiced today in the United States for instance, has no counterpart in Germany's traditional departments of Deutsche Philologie. Whereas the icon in the United States has become an object of investigation for the various studies, it has not yet displaced the littera in Germany's literary sciences. However in the 1990's, the historical sciences in Germany responded to the challenge of the various studies by directing their attention not to cultural studies, but to cultural history, with its well-defined set of methodologies. But what kind of cultural history is it? Is it built on 19th century German foundations, or is it grafted to current North American notions of post-industrial culture? In this paper I show that the supposed opposition between cultural studies and cultural history is artificial. Through a close reading of Hayden White's extremist questioning of historical practice in Metahistory (1973), I demonstrate that there is no opposition between the icon and the littera in this recent radical critique of mainstream humanistic science. The vehement German reaction to his North American assault on European Kultur is based on a misunderstanding of White's premises. Rather than being constructed on a hodgepodge of postmodern approaches, I show that White's postmodern history is in fact conventionally grounded in 19th century Nietzschean thinking.     

A political geography of walking in Jordan: Movement and politics

The past 10-15 years has seen the growth of walking groups taking walkers from Amman to rural parts of Jordan at weekends and the development of the Jordan Trail. Through the narration and analysis of everyday accounts of walking, this paper explores political geographies of identity, movement, and territory in Jordan. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I suggest that at the heart of a growth of walking for leisure in Jordan are important political questions. How is walking conditioned by situated cultural politics? How can walking unearth intimate and embodied accounts of territory in Jordan? I build upon three developments in political geography to do this. First, research on political geography and walking; second research on everyday political geographies of the Middle East; third, critical and feminist work on territory. Literature on political geography and walking is developed by centring Jordanian walkers and the (post)colonial context of Jordan to explore what walking means under different political conditions and for individual bodies. In doing so I contribute to work on identity and nationalism in Jordan and the importance of the everyday to explore political geographies of the Middle East. I develop critical and feminist work on territory by arguing that walking bodies make and contest territory and in doing so calling for greater synergies between cultural and political geography. These arguments are made in two empirical sections. The first explores how different people talk about walking, the language for walking, and assumptions about walking bodies. The second explores how walking connects different bodies to territory, and creates territorial nationalist narratives, but also how walking can highlight indigenous and embodied relations with territory. This paper concludes that walking is political because it shapes and is shaped by situated political geographies and because it enables embodied and intimate accounts of territory to emerge.     

American Girls and French Jeunes Filles: Negotiating National Identities in Interwar France

This essay is a transnational and comparative study of how gendered national stereotypes structured the experience of American women who studied in France in the 1920s and 1930s and how this cross‐cultural exchange contributed to cultural internationalism. In both the French and American popular imaginations, American girls and French jeunes filles connoted opposite modern and traditional notions of femininity. In the process of negotiating these two competing identities in popular consciousness and in daily life, some American women students came to appreciate the limitations of the stereotypes, as well as more complex underlying cultural differences, notably in their encounters with French youth's heterosocial practices and with French women students. I argue that the outcome of this process included women's construction of alternative identities for themselves and a new tolerance and appreciation for cultural difference that represents a distinctive development toward cultural internationalism. This study challenges the cultural asymmetry of United States and European relations between the wars and locates gender and women at their centre.     

Canadian studies and American geography: trends and issues

Geography is perceived to be a relevant contributing discipline within a growing Canadian studies community in the United States, and the Association of American Geographers (AAG) retains a viable Canadian Studies Specialty Group. Since the early 1990s, however, the number of American geographers affiliated with Canadian studies organizations has not significantly increased: the community of scholars remains small and geography holds a peripheral position in terms of its actual contribution to US‐based Canadian studies programs. This article documents and interprets these trends using membership data collected by prominent professional organizations in Canadian studies and geography. It also explores the question of why American geography's Canadian regional specialists are not engaging formal Canadian studies initiatives in greater numbers. The observations that emerge suggest that a diversification of research themes in Canadian studies, particularly in the realms of environmental and physical science, would both increase participation by American geographers and enhance the field's ability to address pertinent aspects of the Canadian experience. Although observations presented pertain directly to the state of Canadian studies in American geography, they may also shed light on the lack of involvement by geographers in a variety of area studies fields in the United States and elsewhere.     

Sexual citizenship, political obligation and disease ecology in gay Seattle

While rights and freedoms of sexual citizenship have been foregrounded in geography, vaguer attention has been given to questions of political obligation. Feminist work on political obligation, grounded with a framing in political ecology of disease, however, provides a means to correct this neglect. Empirically, I narrate a story of local public health politics in Seattle, WA. There, a cultural panic played out in the media over the alleged failure of political obligations by gay men around sexually transmitted infections. Political obligation and ecology usefully extend the concept sexual citizenship on its own terms by moving beyond a rights-versus-obligation polarity, highlighting the biophysical realities of sex, recognizing the spaces in which sex occurs, and noting the social relations inherent in sex and sexuality. Thus, this paper contributes to deeper thinking for activists involved in working through these questions as well as bolstering the notion of sexual citizenship in political geography.     

Scales of justice: law,American Indian treaty rights and the political construction of scale

The organization of political scale has served to facilitate the power of the dominant society to control, exclude and marginalize indigenous populations. This paper examines how geographical scale has shaped the historical and contemporary geography of indigenous peoples in the United States. More specifically, discussion will center upon the importance of scale in shaping natural resource conflicts between American Indians and state governments. Using the case of the Wisconsin Ojibwe treaty rights conflict, this study shows how scale informed the historical development of an exclusionary state natural resource policy and the state's legal effort to protect its monopoly over policy making during a 17 year court case over off-reservation hunting and fishing treaty rights. At the same time, Ojibwe Indians sought to use the dominant society's legal system to gain recognition of their hunting and fishing treaty rights and to alter the existing scale organization of power by decentralizing natural resource decision-making and creating a resource co-management regime. This paper shows how both the state and the tribes were active producers of space and scale and how attempts to restructure geographical scale represent attempts to restructure existing power relations. Although geographical scale and power relations are never fixed and are subject to contestation, this paper shows that the ability of marginalized populations to reshape scales of power is limited by the persistence of assimilationist attitudes and normative assumptions about the scalar organization of political life.     

The historical significance of President Kennedy's visit to Ireland in June 1963

President John F. Kennedy's visit to Ireland in June 1963 was the first by a serving American President. Using materials from archives in London, Dublin, and Boston, this article re-assesses the motives behind Kennedy's decision to visit Ireland and concludes that it was largely a personal journey. However, the trip was not without wider historical and political significance and was surrounded by controversy. The visit was unpopular in the United States, proved a security nightmare, and provoked much discussion amongst the political leadership in Belfast, Dublin and London over Kennedy's attitude to partition. The visit marked a major development in the history of Irish-American relations as it eased tensions over Ireland's neutrality, marked a shift towards White House activism in Irish affairs, boosted Irish tourism, and fostered increased trading and cultural links between the two countries.     

American Microbreweries and Neolocalism: "Ale-ing" for a Sense of Place

Local brewing operations, a part of the cultural landscape since the beginning of civilization, held fast in the United States until the arrival of mass production techniques. After a 100-year decline in the number of United States microbreweries, there has been a remarkable resurgence in the last 15 years. Following on the coattails of Britain's microbrewery revolution, the cultural innovation spread outward from California and has recently affected the Great Plains and the South. One may explain the microbrewery proliferation as a response to changing tastes and a growing beer connoisseur subculture. These are significant elements, but just as important is the neolocal craving that is being satisfied. Cultural geography has much to learn from a careful look at the recent changes in the United States brewing industry.     

Probing the reds and blues: Sectionalism and voter location in the 2000 and 2004 U. S. presidential elections

The election outcomes of a place hinge largely on what is within its political boundaries: economic, social, cultural, and other compositional factors facing voters. Yet, it is also important to investigate geographic context, both within and between places. This study presents renewed emphasis on two geographic factors that relate to electoral outcomes while controlling for compositional attributes: sectional distinctions and population density. Within different regions of the United States and across different locations (urban, suburban, and rural residents), there exist notable differences in presidential voting. Using survey and county-level data on the 2000 and 2004 U.S. presidential elections, this study evaluates the partisan preferences of voters from a regional perspective, and from a density perspective. The findings demonstrate independent relationships between section and voting, and location and voting. A major consequence of the distinctiveness of section and location in the face of migration effects (as noted by others) is the increased spatial polarization of the electorate's political preferences in these recent presidential contests.     

19世纪末至20世纪20年代美国外交思想探析

从19世纪末叶以来,美国外交思想经历了从孤立主义向所谓的“国际主义”的转变,这种转变到了第一次世界大战爆发后基本完成,其核心内容是美国借助着强大的经济、军事和化力量,大踏步地迈向国际政治竞技场,实现这一时期绝大多数美国领导人梦寐以求的世界领袖地位。然而,这种转变在国内外遇到了强大的阻力,最终把美国的世界领袖梦想化为烟云。不过,美国的政治、经济和战略等利益已经使美国无可解脱地与世界联系在一起。就美国外交而言,这是一个不可逆转的趋势,美国人厌恶卷入大洋之外政治事务的传统心态由此正发生着变化,这也预示着美国力图充任世界领袖的时代正在缓慢地到来。     

边疆的空间涵义及其人文地理研究框架

基于空间维度的地理学边疆研究一直为欧美地理学界所关注,并促进了地理学的理论建构。相比之下,我国的边疆研究一直以历史学为主流,人文地理学在边疆研究中的地位有待加强。本文通过对边疆概念的评述认为,习惯上的领土边疆概念无法反映当前边疆所具有的多重涵义,根据功能的不同对边疆进行类型划分十分必要。为此作者将边疆划分为政治边疆、文化边疆和拓居边疆三种类型,并分析了每一类型边疆的空间涵义。基于边疆的分类与空间涵义,本文构建了一个根植于人文地理学的边疆研究框架,并初步提出了人文地理学边疆研究的维度、视角及重点内容。     

Young people,place and devolved politics: perceived scale(s) of political concerns among under 18s living in Wales

Despite clear linkages between conceptualisations and perceptions of politics, society, culture and territorial rescaling, research into young people’s political engagement, participation and representation is underrepresented in the field of social and cultural geography. Here the gap is addressed using perceptions of devolved politics, as a form of territorial rescaling, among young people living in Wales. Specifically, it shows the geographical scales at which young people locate their political concerns and where responsibility for these concerns is perceived to lie, with a focus on the National Assembly for Wales and the Welsh Government. This is a key contribution to our understanding of the role devolution plays in youth political engagement in the light of the following: the relative infancy of the devolved U.K. institutions; their asymmetrical development and increasing divergences; the growing variation in turnout among young people for different types of election and referenda; and the lack of research examining the youth engagement dimension of Welsh devolution as a political, social and cultural process of territorial rescaling in the U.K. The paper concludes with a critique of the notion that devolution poses a ‘politics of hope’ for youth political engagement in Wales, a very different picture to Scotland.     

China and Geography in the 21st Century: A Cultural (Geographical) Revolution?

A noted Singapore-based cultural geographer and specialist on Asia reviews the recent emergence of cultural geographic research on and within China and the implications of China's rise for the study of 21st century cultural geography more broadly. She identifies six major issues modern China is confronting that, when addressed from a cultural geographical perspective, may both enhance an understanding of the country and reshape the practice of cultural geography as a subdiscipline: agricultural reform, economic reform, urban change, rural-urban migration and related social inequalities, the changing family structure, and environmental change. The author argues that if China's cultural geography is to help the subdiscipline at large develop a more international and inclusive approach, it must be driven by questions of significance in China, yield constructive answers of relevance to China, and at the same time derive theoretical ideas that diversify the collective geographical imagination.     

沙学浚区域研究的特点与方法

沙学浚在政治地理、军事地理、历史地理等领域所取得的研究成果,多基于他对不同时空、不同尺度、不同类型区域的准确把握与深入认识.通过对沙氏不同时期论著中关于区域划分、认知、分析等方面思想方法的梳理与总结,可以发现,重视海洋的区域研究视角、空间价值与地位价值相结合的区域研究方法,以及宏观时空视野与动态发展观相结合的区域研究理...